Are you being sarcastic or ignorant? I legitimately can’t tell. I’m low on time so I’ll only cover recent events:
2025: then PM Bayrou proposed massive budget cuts to pensions, welfare, and cutting 2 holidays for the sake of “productivity”. Massive uprisings across the country “Bloquons Tout” (Block Everything), government collapsed.
2024: Tractor blockades around Paris (“Siege of Paris”) and across the country forced the government to drop the planned phase-out of the diesel fuel tax break, provide €400 million in emergency aid and announce other concessions.
2018-19: the “Gilets jaunes” riots, weeks of protests including violence on the Champs-Élysées, caused by Macron’s pro-wealthy politicies (abolishing the “solidarity wealth tax” that applied to millionaires, or the “exit tax” letting them run away with their fortunes to tax havens, and several more), earning the nickname “Président des riches”. The riots forced an increase in minimum wages, scrapping of a fuel tax that would disproportionately tax the poor, tax relief for pensioners and other tax cuts that directly improved low-income families, etc.
You can go back and keep finding more and more examples of situations where ACTUALLY FIGHTING for your rights caused the money grabbing elite to actually stop in their tracks - for a while.
Yeah, that’s a bunch of wishful thinking. Snap elections were called in 2024 because of the rise of popularity of the far-right. The resulting hung parliament was too weak to push pension reforms changes and had to compromise. The protests served more as a backdrop to all this than the direct cause of any of it.
Yellow wests protested for months and achieved nothing. Then Covid hit and government relaxed some of its reforms to save the economy and the protests fizzled out.
I will give you the farmers protests. The right-wing aligned farmer unions were successful at extorting the government. 1 out of 3 is not bad but it’s really not the ‘world champions of protesting’ levels people think it is. Most of the time it’s just bunch of rioting that results in nothing.
And for those that wish to see video evidence of French protest success, this video covers the ZAD de Notre-Dame-des-Landes who have repeatedly defeated the French government.
Are you being sarcastic or ignorant? I legitimately can’t tell. I’m low on time so I’ll only cover recent events:
2025: then PM Bayrou proposed massive budget cuts to pensions, welfare, and cutting 2 holidays for the sake of “productivity”. Massive uprisings across the country “Bloquons Tout” (Block Everything), government collapsed.
2024: Tractor blockades around Paris (“Siege of Paris”) and across the country forced the government to drop the planned phase-out of the diesel fuel tax break, provide €400 million in emergency aid and announce other concessions.
2018-19: the “Gilets jaunes” riots, weeks of protests including violence on the Champs-Élysées, caused by Macron’s pro-wealthy politicies (abolishing the “solidarity wealth tax” that applied to millionaires, or the “exit tax” letting them run away with their fortunes to tax havens, and several more), earning the nickname “Président des riches”. The riots forced an increase in minimum wages, scrapping of a fuel tax that would disproportionately tax the poor, tax relief for pensioners and other tax cuts that directly improved low-income families, etc.
You can go back and keep finding more and more examples of situations where ACTUALLY FIGHTING for your rights caused the money grabbing elite to actually stop in their tracks - for a while.
Yeah, that’s a bunch of wishful thinking. Snap elections were called in 2024 because of the rise of popularity of the far-right. The resulting hung parliament was too weak to push pension reforms changes and had to compromise. The protests served more as a backdrop to all this than the direct cause of any of it.
Yellow wests protested for months and achieved nothing. Then Covid hit and government relaxed some of its reforms to save the economy and the protests fizzled out.
I will give you the farmers protests. The right-wing aligned farmer unions were successful at extorting the government. 1 out of 3 is not bad but it’s really not the ‘world champions of protesting’ levels people think it is. Most of the time it’s just bunch of rioting that results in nothing.
And for those that wish to see video evidence of French protest success, this video covers the ZAD de Notre-Dame-des-Landes who have repeatedly defeated the French government.
https://kolektiva.media/w/o4MvBiXYFEb1rrZ7RqXvYR
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_to_Defend
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZAD_de_Notre-Dame-des-Landes